July 23 (SeeNews) - The twenty-nine banks operating in Serbia posted a combined net profit of 8.09 billion dinars ($93.3 million/69.3 million euro) in the first quarter of 2014, down from 10.84 billion dinars in the same period a year earlier, the country's central bank said on Wednesday.
Nineteen banks posted a profit, of 9.3 billion dinars in total, and the remainder closed the year in the red, reporting a combined loss of 1.2 billion dinars, the National Bank of Serbia (NBS) said in a regular banking sector report.
Total gross non-performing loans (NPLs) of the Serbian banking sector increased to 403.4 billion dinars by the end of March from 395.3 billion dinars a at the end of last year, with the share of gross NPLs in the total gross loans rising by 0.8 percentage points to 22.2%.
The capital adequacy ratio at the end of March stood at 21.2%, up from 20.9% at the end of December.
The banking sector's total net assets decreased by 22.5 billion dinars from end-2013, reaching 2,824 billion dinars. The decrease was partially owed to the delicensing of local Univerzal Banka, the NBS said.
Banca Intesa Beograd ranked first in terms of assets, totalling 415 billion dinars. Komercijalna Banka [BEL:KMBN] and UniCredit Bank Srbija followed with 337 billion dinars and 231 billion dinars, respectively.
The number of people employed in local banks reached 25,706 by the end of March.
(1 euro=116.7255 Serbian dinars)